How to Upload a Photo to Instagram From Your Desktop Computer

August 6, 2016

I’ve been thinking a lot about website marketing lately. I don’t do much of it because I’m so busy writing. Currently, between this site and my other one (IndustryEats), I produce about five posts per week. If you’re not in the blogging world, let me tell you – that’s sort of a lot. I know folks who write one post per week or even one per month. Conversely, I know people who post more than once per day, which makes me very jealous. I wish I had that sort of tenacity. Five is good though and I’m happy with that number – for now.

I feel as though the posts I write are informative. I think I share my personality as well as some good information in each and every one of them. It’s a shame that the content I manage doesn’t just magically fly out into the interland by itself, because I think many would benefit from it. Alas, I must market, which is, if you haven’t noticed, not one of my strong suits. At least it’s easier to accomplish today than it’s ever been.

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Currently, I have a few social media profiles active for this blog. They are on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and now, just today, Instagram. Feel free to follow me on any and all of them. Hint, hint.

It’s taken a while for me to jump into the social media pond. I’ve been blogging since 2006 and I’m not from the school of being “popular.” The way things used to work is that I would write something interesting and helpful, the search engines would find it and index it and people would visit my site through them. Although that still happens, it takes a lot longer these days and the competition is fierce. While I’m confident in my posts being helpful and having them indexed, I’d like to take advantage of every marketing channel I have at my disposal. And to be honest, it would be rather foolish of me not to share content with those who may be interested on their turf, not mine. They’re on social media, so that’s where I should be too.

As I’ve done with my other accounts, I’ll be posting the leading photos for each post I write. When I came up with this idea, I thought it was great. That was…until I ran into a bit of a snag.

Apparently, Instagram was created as a mobile app. The developers worked around the premise that if you had a smartphone in your pocket, it would be super easy to snap a photo of something and zoom that photo off to Instagram. And in theory, that works perfectly for the everyday user. The thing is, I’m not an everyday user and I don’t take many photos with cell phones. The most I do is photograph our gardens in our back yard with my Samsung tablet to send out to family members. But those photos aren’t what I’d like to share on Instagram. I’d like to actually upload images from my desktop computer that represent the blog posts I produce.

It took a few moments to gather my thoughts after I read the following statement on Instagram’s help page:

Note: You can’t take or upload photos from a desktop computer.

I told myself that couldn’t be true. Who in the world creates something like this? Honestly, there are still folks out there who use computers, whether they be Windows users or Mac users. That’s a huge market that they’re making things difficult for. I’m not sure of the reason, but I think it’s silly.

Anyway, I discovered a method that makes it extremely simple to upload photos or images from your desktop computer to Instagram and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s through an app called Deskgram.

This tiny app basically gives you the power to log right into your Instagram account and manage it from your computer. It’s genius. Let’s go over the steps of what’s necessary to get rolling with this. It’s really easy.

First, you’ll need to visit Deskgram and download their app. After you download it (I downloaded the .EXE file because it uses an auto-installer), you’ll need to install it. Simply double-click on the installer icon and off you go. Follow the directions and, when finished, you should see a shortcut on your desktop. I deleted that and created a shortcut from my Start menu.

If you’d like to know how to create this shortcut, please read this post:

Anyway, after you have the shortcut in working order, go ahead and double-click it to launch the program. When you do, you’ll be presented with the login dialog box.

Simply log in with your Instagram credentials, click the Login with Instagram button and when that’s done, you should see your start screen.

Click the Upload Photo icon (outlined above) and you’ll see another window. This time, you just drag your photo into the box at the center of the window or click the center box to browse your computer for the photo.

Once the photo is selected and uploaded, it will appear in the window.

Yes, I’m uploading the leading image for this post.

When the picture appears in this window, there will be a “resizer” overlaying it. You can grab the corners of this resizer to dictate the visible areas of the image after it’s applied to your Instagram account. In my case, I would like as much visible as possible, so I dragged the corners to show everything. When finished sizing the image, click the blue arrow in the top right corner of the window. When you do this, the next screen will appear.

On this screen, you can select an effect for the photo, if desired. I’m not a fancy man, so I didn’t choose anything other than Normal. After this, click on the green check box at the top right of the window to bring you to the Caption screen.

Since I’m uploading an image for this post, I merely filled in the post title. When done with this, I clicked the small Upload arrow in the upper right corner of the window to complete the process. When I do that, a small box appears that tells me my image is being uploaded. After a few seconds, it will complete and I’ll need to X out of the box to close it. That’s it!

Now, if I visit my Instagram page and refresh it, I’ll see the image I just uploaded. And if I click on that image, it’ll pop up to show the entire thing.

And that’s the entire process. Do you have other methods to upload pictures from your desktop computer to your Instagram account? If so, please share them in the comment section below. Thanks!

——

UPDATE: Apparently, the software I recommended in this post only lets you use it for a specific period of time before it stops functioning and asks you to pay for the premium or pro edition. I don’t recommend using it anymore. I now have a new method for uploading to Instagram:

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About Jay Gaulard

Hi. My name is Jay Gaulard and I've been designing websites and taking photographs since 2002. My passions lie with learning the latest coding techniques and development tools as well as staying on top of the digital imaging world. When I'm not studying or writing, I'm practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Maine, USA.

Comments

A few thoughts. First, regarding posting from your computer, I have read in a few articles that Instagram is able to ascertain if images have been uploaded from a computer versus a phone and they soup press the visibility of those posts. Not sure if this is true or not, but another exceedingly simple way to get around the problem is to simply drop small versions of your images into your dropbox, and then use your phone to post them on to Instagram. Problem solved!

Regarding social media accounts, what I have found over the years and also heard repeated, is that it is better to have a smaller selection of *relevant* social media accounts that are updated on a regular basis than having a presence in many places where it becomes impossible to regularly put content on all of them.

Not all social media portals are good for photographers. For example Twitter. I think Twitter is fantastic for news updates or emergency broadcasts etc. (or stupid celebrity gossip). Does not seem useful for a photographer however.

Also Pinterest. Look at the audience of Pinterest. It is new moms and teenagers who are collecting pictures of their dream weddings. No one on Pinterest is looking for technical articles on photography or Photoshop. To me that totally does not seem like your audience.

So you could run yourself ragged trying to contribute to places that have absolutely no net benefit to you.

Lastly, and sorry for going on so long, is that it is important not to make the mistake of posting the same exact content on all of your social media platforms. While there isn’t 100% overlap in audience, / readers, once people see that you’re posting the same thing everywhere they will unfollow most of them and only follow you in one place.

I may print this comment out and frame it. I think it may be the best one I’ve ever gotten. Thank you for that. I can definitely tell that you took some time to write it and I truly appreciate it.

You offer some awesome advice. There sure is a lot to consider when using social media and promoting websites. These are the types of things we need to think about daily – being clever and effective rather then simply swamping sites with excessive and duplicate information.

I saw this interview with one of the founders of Pinterest a while ago (I can’t find it now) where it was mentioned that their fastest growing audience is men. I think, by far, the site is full of recipes and weddings, but I’m noticing that there are more and more diversified posts there, such as DIY and home improvement. It’s fun to watch. I try to keep my eyes on how these social media sites grow and change through the years. It’s funny, I can remember when all my friends had MySpace accounts and Facebook was hardly even used. Then one day – BAM – everything changed. Facebook was king. Then, a few years after that, I was informed that no teens use Facebook anymore and that they are on Instagram or something like that. The reason for this was because their parents didn’t know how to use Instagram and therefore couldn’t spy on them. Who knows.

I think I’m going to keep dabbling to discover what works and what doesn’t. If something doesn’t, then it’ll get dropped off the list. I think you’ll be surprised at Pinterest when it comes to photography and Photoshop. I just typed “Photoshop” into the search field and I see some posts that have been pinned 29k, 40k and even 150k times. Perhaps that audience is growing as well. Once these things catch fire, they catch fire.

Lastly, I can see that you have very good information. If you’d ever be interested in sharing some more of it via a guest post or some other way, I’d be honored to have you contribute to this site. Please give it some thought and let me know if you’d consider it.

Thanks!

Jay

PS – As I was looking around yesterday, I did see some suggestions about uploading to Instagram using Dropbox. Unfortunately, since I don’t have an account with them and don’t use that service, I couldn’t offer anything worthwhile. Perhaps I’ll look into them though.

About IndustryDev

IndustryDev is an online publication that focuses primarily on lovers of the digital world. We write articles that cast a wide net, including those that discuss website development, design and WordPress. We also post, daily, about the image related aspects of the web, including photography and illustration, along with other topics like blogging and SEO.